The ideas behind this one have been brewing for a good long time, starting years back with Stuart's "When do heroes become too powerful?" thread. Short version is that while the AFF2 combat system works great in itself, Player Character progression doesn't seem to be tuned for the monsters in the Pit books. There's of course any number of ways you can make that adjustment. This one is based on keeping it as simple and as true to the original rules as possible.

On top of that I've done a critical hit table, completely separate to the PC/creature balance fix but they go nicely together. There have been some great critical hit tables done before so this is nothing new. What I've tried to do is balance it so overall the crit results aren't more dangerous than in the rulebook while still giving an interesting range of results.

Oh that reminds me. The new sheet was mainly to let you have the AS bonus and crit range handy for each weapon but I also made a few more changes like adding a slot for a 4th weapon type. The main one was swapping the big Cantrips box for more spell slots. With cantrips all having the same cost you can always write them in to the spell slots more than one to a box. Let me know what else you'd like changed to make your ideal character sheet.

Good God this is a thing of beauty, thank you for putting it together. You managed to address one of the few issues with AFF, the deterministic nature of combat between opponents with more than a moderate skill difference, in a simple and elegant way.

Thanks everyone. I've updated the link to v1.1, I'd missed fitting Potions of Skill into the crit system and tweaked the crit effects a bit.

I was really happy with the way the AFF Rulebook look worked out and I'm thinking of redoing my other stuff the same way. Except the cover the pics are all by Wendelin Boeheim and from Wikimedia Commons. I just did a bit of weapon rearranging and clean up on them.

The way I made the game more challenging was to allow the character to make a number of “contested rolls” (standard rules) equal to their number of attacks while any other incoming attacks needed to beat a target number of 15 plus modifiers. The player of course got to decide which one of the incoming attacks they wished to contest.

So if they were attacked by a bunch of whatever’s who had SKILL of 8, 7, and 6: the player (1 Attack) would contest against the 8, usually, while the 7 and 6 would need to meet or beat a 15 to hit. Don’t forget the outnumbering modifier.